History as Social Practice: Unconventional Historiographies of Korea

Public debate in Korea is rife with references to historical antecedents. Representations of history abound in popular culture, from TV dramas over feature movies and manhwa to novels and poems. Contentious historical issues mobilise crowds, infuse political debates and rally netizens in fierce internet discussions. History is clearly not – and never was – the sole preserve of professional academic historians. Historians may speak with an authoritative voice, but they hold no monopoly over the production of historical narratives. Neither are they independent players, but rather actors within a complex institutional web of power relations, where history is an important commodity in the construction of political legitimacy and/or social identity. The ordering principle of such historical narratives is more often than not the nation, though its hegemonic sway does not make it a monolithic concept.

Through a complex process of social interaction between various players each endowed with specific cultural capital, historical narratives are produced, reproduced and inverted, creating an intricate web of Korean Histories that coexist, intersect and mutually influence each other. The diversity of historical representations is further compounded by the array of cultural media, each with their own set of rules and conventions, that are mobilized. More traditional print media (books, newspapers, magazines, literature, advertisements) are juxtaposed with various other cultural media (music, film, TV drama, opera and musicals, theatre plays, monuments and memorial halls, folk and fine arts) and such low threshold media as internet blogs and chat fora. What ensues is a chequered historical landscape where methodologically sound and empirically solid histories produced by professional historians based on “authoritative” sources coexist with more informal, intuitive, often fluid and highly contextual understandings of history. In the interaction between “high history” and “low history”, the latter feeds on the former, but in a sketchy manner. In a roundabout way, a less articulate, sometimes incoherent, but often pervasive understanding of Korean history taps into a historical matrix, an intuitive, unarticulated and elusive repository of historical images, concepts and facts that all practitioners, whether of “high history” or “low history” relate to. Researching history as a social practice with an awareness of these aspects reveals much about the contents, dynamics and functions of historical narratives in society and the nature of historical debates.

This project is by nature multidisciplinary, treating historiography also as a social science, approaching history as a cultural product, to be analysed from various theoretical angles; from literary criticism over cultural studies to art history. Methodologically, it treats representations of history on an equal footing irrespective of its producer, with an equal interest in both textual and pictorial materials.